Doodle Science - April 2015

A Geiger counter, my Geiger counter. I always wondered about some of the bits and bobs I have so I thought I would check. This wonderful bit of cold war kit was made in Poland ages ago, has sat in some warehouse for almost as long, thankfully never called into action and then eventually came to me. It works, sensitive to alpha and beta I have found a couple of minerals that get it going and an aeroplane compass, whose radium dial causes a few clicks. No hidden sources in the kitchen though.

Great Dates in Sci and Tech for April

1st 1753 ~ Lineaus first publishes his Species Plantarum and so gets systematic naming of the natural world going.
2nd 1933 ~ First sighting of the Loch Ness monster. Did they or didn't they? One thing is for certain, nobody has caught it.
5th 1925 ~ John Scopes is arrested in Tennessee for teaching evolution and in 1804 the High Possil Meteorite is the first recorded meteorite fall in Scotland.
7th 1795~ France adopts the metre as the basic unit of length measurement.
11th 1905 ~Einstein unveils special relativity.
17th 1902 ~ Spiridion Stais finds the Antikethyra mechanism.
24th 1849 ~ Morse transmits the first telegraph message from Baltimore to Washington.
29th 1919 ~ Arthur Eddington takes measurements of stars during an eclipse to test Einsteins theory of relativity.
1st 1966 ~ Venera 3 space probe landed but did not send back the first pictures of the surface of the planet Venus